Indigenous engagement in research partnerships.

The resources available here on the Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Research Partnership project pages are about partnerships between researchers.  As well as partnership between academics, they are relevant to the increasing number of UK-based researchers are working transnationally and internationally among Indigenous peoples.  

A recent webinar, organised by People’s Palace Projects for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Economic and Social Research council (ESRC), addressed Indigenous engagement in research partnerships and knowledge mobilsation. 

Participants discussed the challenges faced in engaging with Indigenous communities while undertaking co-production of knowledge, and to identify good practice and gaps in good practice.

A particular highlight of the webinar was video contributions from Indigenous peoples about how the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting their communities.

A link to our project resources is also featured on the webinar page.

Decolonising and Indigenous research

An event bringing perspectives together

Ian Calliou, an Indigenous researcher, and our Project PI Ros Edwards, a non-Indigenous researcher, presented a complementary pair of papers at a QUEST (Qualitative Expertise at Southampton) seminar looking at decolonising and Indigenous approaches to generating knowledge through research.

Ian talked about his project on Canadian truth and reconciliation from an Indigenous perspective and using an Indigenous methodology as ‘getting lost and finding your way home’. Ian was surrounded by members of the audience after his presentation, wanting to know more.

Ian Calliou presents
Ian Calliou

Ros discussed the Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnerships project and its online resources, covering the context of the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund, epistemologies and decolonisation, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborations.

Ros Edwards


Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnerships resources

by Ros Edwards

Lead qualitative researchers from the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods were invited to run a panel session at the 4th World Conference on Qualitative Research, held at Lusófona University of Porto, Portugal, 16-18 October 2019.  As part of the panel session on ‘Methodological Innovations and Resources: Forms of Data, Partnership and Pedagogy’, Ros Edwards presented a paper on the Indigenous and non-Indigenous Research Partnerships project.  Here she outlines the main issues that she covered and those raised by the audience.

With researchers from 30-odd countries attending, the WCQR 2019 was an excellent venue to present the why and what of our web, audio and visual resources to inform Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnerships.  

I explained the context for our project.  On a pragmatic level, this was the UK Research and Innovation call for International Collaboration Network proposals, but on a more fundamental level, we sought to provide resources to support researchers who are embarking on Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnerships to think about their methods, assumptions and behaviour. 

I outlined the fundamental epistemological issues, where it is important to create and decolonise a space in which to value Indigenous knowledges, transform ways of understanding the world, and relate to Indigenous peoples and scholars that do not position them as deficit.

I showed conference participants the text, audio and visual resources that we had available on our website and those that were in development, to act as prompts to start thinking about the challenges and tensions in Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnership working.

Researchers from the Philippines, Kenya, Columbia, New Zealand and Canada were especially interested in discussing the project and its resources.  There were suggestions that the resources could be used not only for research partnerships and in teaching methods, but also to inform research funders, government and the general public. 

Participants also wondered what the approach might mean for writing up research and disseminating it.  Others asked knotty questions about the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researcher partnerships and empowering Indigenous peoples, and raised the issue of the need to inform and decolonise the powerful elites in the Southern sphere so that they understand the value and significance of Indigenous knowledges.

In other words, I learnt as much from the audience in my presentation as they may have done from me.

Amplifying the voices of Indigenous researchers: an ethical approach to collaboration

by Helen Kara

In most disciplines in the Euro-Western paradigm, research collaboration is usually seen as a straightforwardly good thing. Perhaps this is why there is very little Euro-Western literature on the ethics of collaborative research.

In the Indigenous literature, by contrast, collaboration with Euro-Western researchers is seen as potentially dangerous, probably because Indigenous peoples around the world have experienced various abuses at the hands of researchers in so-called ‘collaborations’. Given this, it is not surprising that the Indigenous literature has more to say about the ethical aspects of collaboration than the Euro-Western literature.

For instance, it is important to take the time to articulate, and learn to understand, each other’s worldviews (Chilisa 2012). And the above examples suggest that research work and the benefits accruing from such work should be shared equally by Euro-Western and Indigenous researchers working together.

What about those Euro-Western researchers who would like to collaborate with Indigenous researchers but can’t travel to work with them? I’m in that position as an independent researcher with no budget for extended overseas assignments. However, occasionally Indigenous researchers come to the UK and give us the opportunity to work with or learn from them here.

Indigenous research paradigm

I was lucky enough to be at the NCRM Research Methods Festival in Bath, England, in 2016 when there was a seminar on post-colonial and Indigenous research methods. The presenters were Professor Bagele Chilisa from Botswana, Professor Helen Moewaka Barnes from New Zealand, and Dr Deborah McGregor from Canada. They taught me that there is an Indigenous research paradigm which stands alone, predates the Euro-Western research paradigm by millennia, and encompasses decolonising methodologies rather than the other way around. 

This one seminar has had a profound influence on my work. I was underway with writing a book on research ethics and my learning from the seminar led me to completely change the book’s direction. I found and read as much literature on Indigenous research as I could, beginning with Professor Chilisa’s excellent book on Indigenous Research Methodologies.

I learned a great deal from this literature. I learned that opinions are divided within Indigenous communities about the rights and wrongs of sharing information in writing. Ila Bussidor, former chief of the Sayisi Dene community from Manitoba in Canada, researched and wrote a book called Night Spirits: the Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene with her friend the journalist and broadcaster Ć°stƱn Bilgen-Reinard. This book tells the story of the Government-forced relocation of the Sayisi Dene in 1956, from their ancestral homelands at Duck Lake to the outskirts of the town of Churchill, and the community’s subsequent disintegration.

From my Euro-Western perspective this is a crucial, hard-hitting, breath-taking book – yet some Sayisi Dene people did not want their story told in writing. Ida Bussidor spoke eloquently about her experience of this:

“When my book came out, there was a big fight and they threw chairs at me. They didn’t want the information out. I never was able to take the pride and success of that book, never.’

(Lambert 2014:177)

Community division

As a fellow author, I felt so much sympathy for Bussidor. As a scholar, I found her story of community division interesting because it is a story rarely told in the literature to date. Yet despite this divided opinion, a growing number of Indigenous researchers and others are publishing writings about their ways of life. 

Those of us who would like to collaborate with Indigenous researchers but are not currently able to travel can benefit from reading these writings. Of course texts can’t teach us everything. Nor would we learn ‘everything’ by spending time with Indigenous peoples; many communities have sacred and/or secret knowledges that they would not share with outsiders (and nor should they be expected, or even asked, to do so) (Kovach 2009;McKemmish et al 2010Koitsiwe 2013Bowman, Francis and Tyndall 2015).

But texts can teach us a lot, and can enable us to collaborate on one level: by acknowledging and citing this literature in our own work, as I am doing here and have done throughout my book on research ethics.

Even at this level of collaboration there is ethical danger. For example, there is the danger of being extractive, i.e. using information provided by Indigenous people for our own benefit and giving nothing back, as countless Euro-Western researchers have already done (Denzin 2005[1]Gaudry 2015). Then there is the danger of recolonising research ethics (Land 2015) by subsuming the Indigenous paradigm within a Euro-Western work (Wilson 2008). 

Recolonising in a different way

I thought long and hard about the ethics of my writing. To me it also felt unethical to ignore this body of literature, as though by doing that I would be recolonising in a different way, i.e. contributing to the erasure of communities and peoples. I felt as though I could be recolonising whichever way I wrote. 

I was glad to find calls in the Indigenous literature for Euro-Western researchers to share, rather than claim, the intellectual space (Smith 2012:202). Then I was helped by an online conversation with Erika Langham from Central Queensland University, a non-Indigenous researcher who works with Indigenous researchers in Australia, who suggested that part of my role in this work is not to replace but to amplify Indigenous voices. And I learned from the Indigenous literature about the need to work carefully and respectfully with that literature.

I was immensely fortunate to receive a review of the final draft of my book from the Indigenous researcher Deborah McGregor, who waived anonymity so that I could ask her questions (and thank her and credit her input in the book, which was not something she asked for but which felt important to do). Professor McGregor, as she now is, pointed out that I should clarify my relationship to Indigenous research. I thought hard about that, and concluded that

‘My relationship with Indigenous research is that of a student, with Indigenous researchers as my teachers; mostly through their writings and occasionally through their talk.’

(Kara 2018:17)

There are other ethical dimensions to this work. For example, since publication of my book, I have been asked several times to speak as an ‘expert’ on Indigenous research. I have declined these invitations because I am not and never will be such an expert. Only an Indigenous researcher can take that position. I am working on finding Indigenous researchers to whom I can pass such invitations; I hope this blog post will help. 

I will continue to do all I can to amplify Indigenous voices in my work and in my life. I’m by no means sure I’ve got all of the answers on the ethical aspects of doing this, but I have at least made some progress in that direction. I’d be delighted to read your reactions and thoughts in the comments.

[1] Denzin, N. K. (2005). Emancipatory discourses and the ethics and politics of interpretation. The Sage handbook of qualitative research3, 933-958.

A UK researcher in Aotearoa New Zealand: ethical practice

by Rosalind Edwards

I spent the UK winter-spring/ANZ summer-autumn of 2014 on a Leverhulme Trust International Academic Fellowship at the University of Otago, with the aims of learning about kaupapa Māori research and carrying out a small project on fathers’ experiences of bringing up ‘mixed’ race children.  This research was not about Māori fathers of mixed children per se, but this is a common situation in Aotearoa New Zealand.  I applied for ethical approval for the project from the ethics committee at my home university, the University of Southampton.  No problems were raised with my application and it was approved as ethical research practice.

Once in Aotearoa New Zealand, having read more deeply and had discussions with Māori and other colleagues about kaupapa Māori research approaches, the ethics of my research became subject to question.  I wondered about my University judging my research practice as ethical when – to my knowledge – none of my thoughtful reviewer colleagues know much about the ANZ context.  I was faced with a strong response from some Māori researchers I met that my project was not ethical; indeed some saw it as replicating colonialising practices.  I am not out of sympathy with this viewpoint: I arrive from the UK, impose a model of (ethical) governance, grab resources (data) that belong to someone else (see later), use them for my own benefit, and then disappear off again.

There are several disjunctures raised in posing my research as colonising and questioning my practice as ethical, including between the nature of knowledge and notions of and bases for ethical practice.

Along with other institutions, my University operates with an assumption that a person’s knowledge and experiences are theirs – that they assess the pros and cons of disclosure and consent (or not) to participate in research as individuals (unless deemed ‘vulnerable’).  This is an individualistic notion of the nature of knowledge.  In contrast, as I understand it, a broad Māori understanding of the nature of knowledge is that it belongs to the collective – the wider family/sub-tribe/tribe.  A researcher does not (just) get consent from the individual to participate in their research because their knowledge about Māori life and experiences is not their individual possession.

I have not seen a UK University ethics form that asks whether or not the applicant for ethical approval has consulted with the population to be studied about carrying out the research and whether or not it is considered by them to be a useful piece of work.  But as I understand it, that is a standard sort of question on ANZ ethics application forms.  So on that governance count alone, while my research had been judged ethical in the UK, it may not be ethical from a governance point of view in ANZ, and it is unethical from a kaupapa Māori sympathetic perspective.

Accountability is a strong element of ethical research practice. As it has been explained to me, the fact that Māori will introduce themselves by elaborating their ancestry and land connections locates them in a web of interconnected relationships and responsibilities.  This makes them accountable to their research subjects in a very different way.  If they act in a way that harms the community, then it is not just their reputation that will suffer, but the whole of their extended family will be involved in that currently and into the future. In contrast, in ‘Western’ models of ethical practice, primary accountability is to professional and institutional codes of practice.  If a researcher acts badly then their University and professional association will see that as a breach of academic/disciplinary regulations, but it is the researcher as an individual who bears the damaged reputation.  The researcher’s accountability to research subjects is limited to the relevant legislation about ownership and use of data. The ‘message’ of the research is not bad behaviour in itself.

So, I am not accountable in a Māori sense.  While I may be held accountable institutionally and professionally, my ‘personal’ connections are not involved.  Thus I may behave ethically according to UK practice, but that does not mean I am behaving ethically in the kaupapa Māori sense.